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Initially, the few women who smoked had to do it in hiding. Today, the picture is different: increasingly more young women are puffing in the open
Jump to full article: East African Standard (ke), 2006-05-20
Author: Mukami Githagui
Intro: I had my first real flirtation with cigarettes when I was 18 years old. I recall, while growing up, how I observed older people around me lighting up. Keen and excited, I watched as they took deep puffs, invisibly but enviably passing the smoke down to their lungs. Intrigued, I would stare at the smokers with rapt attention as the smoke streamed out of their nostrils and mouths. And I thought to myself: Wow! Isn’t that cool?
It was not until a couple of years later that I discovered how not-so-cool it all was. . . .
"I don’t want to say society has become more tolerant because, in Mozambique, there are more women my mother’s age who smoke than women of my age," she reveals.
In Mutola’s country, it was much more fashionable to smoke in the 70s than it is today. . . .
Fardos Abdul echoes these sentiments. She says: "In the Koran, smoking is forbidden for any gender. Furthermore, I support those who want the habit of smoking in public to be banned." Smoking women, she observes, paint a bad image of society.
Such harsh anti-smoking sentiments notwithstanding, some women tend to view cigarette smoking as a form of acceptable relaxation following a hard day’s work. Others tend to pick up the habit as a weight-loss measure . . .
It has been publicly said that smoking can lead to infertility in women, especially those who choose to delay conceiving until they are in their 30s or 40s. None of this, however, appears to matter to young women smokers.
As far as they are concerned, the clamouring by regulators and policy makers is nothing but a futile attempt to take away nicotine, their drug of choice.
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